Johnsons Cars

Johnsons Cars was formed in 1999 with just Volvo as their only brand. The company now has 31 dealerships throughout England, selling and servicing new and used cars across nine di erent brands, including Volkswagen, Lexus, Toyota, Fiat, Volvo and Alfa Romeo.

“Our business intelligence solution has undoubtedly helped us realise a greater return on the investment in all our systems. We have true transparency right across our business.”

The Challenge

Johnsons needed to bring together both financial and non financial data from multiple systems into a centralised hub for fast, easy and accurate reporting of KPIs and ROI across the business.

The Solution

Johnsons chose Tahola for their expertise in implementing business intelligence solutions in the motor industry. QlikView was the solution selected after Tahola demonstrated a number of alternatives to Johnsons. The solution pulls data from their main Kerridge rev8 (now ADP) company database and integrates with data from other systems, including an online service booking platform and the Toyota/Lexus CRM system, V8.

“We now have a wealth of information across all parts of our business, including sales, service, parts, labour and customers,” says Lesley Brown, Group Marketing and Database Manager. “We can see at a glance items such as our sales and stock performance, ageing stock, costs, after sales labour/parts sold. We can understand our customers like never before. Our lapsed customer summary enables us to drill down to analyse, for example, geography and age of vehicle. This then helps drive effective marketing strategies to retain those customers.”

With their Real Time Communica ons (RTC) online service booking system, Johnsons can see the full circle of customer service management — from automatically sending a 4 week advance reminder of service, right through to analysing which customers then booked in, the revenue generated on parts/ labour, and the margin per job.

In order to disseminate information throughout the organisation, Johnsons are using NPrinting, the most advanced report generation, distribution and scheduling application available for QlikView. It enables them to quickly create and modify reports, generate and filter them based on updated data and distribute them to a range of managers across the business whenever they need to. “NPrinting has really added value,” says Lesley. “It has significantly reduced the time and resource needed to get reports to the right people in our business—from Franchise Directors and Managers, to General and Service Managers as well as the Finance team. It also means that reports can be sent to more people without the need for additional QlikView licences.”

The Result

“Our managers love having this timely and easy access to our main KPIs,” continues Lesley. “They don’t have the time to scroll through reams of data themselves. Now they can quickly see where they need to focus their efforts in order to impact the performance of the business.”

From a marketing perspective, Johnsons are able to quickly and simply conduct all their market and customer segmenta on within QlikView and then automatically push that data to Cheetahmail from Experian for email campaigning. The next step is to begin extracting data from Cheetahmail in order to further enhance customer understanding and insight.

“Our business intelligence solution has undoubtedly helped us realise a greater return on the investment in all our systems,” concludes Lesley. “We have true transparency right across our business.”

Timely/easy access to data with greater transparency

More time for analysis rather than data capture, saving time and money